Hello folks!

This blog post is a week late (forgot I had a blog :P). This is an update on the status of my GSOC project. Last week, I added a command plug-in to Simon. This plug-in (called Media Player Control) allows Simon to send commands to any media player which follows MPRIS specifications, and most of the popular players do follow these specifications including (but not limited to) PMC, Amarok, VLC, Dragon.

The plug-in currently supports the commands:

  • Play / Pause
  • Stop
  • Next / Previous
  • Volume Up/Down
  • Seek Ahead/Back

Some of you may be wondering that Simon already had a DBus plug-in, so why was this one needed? The existing DBus plug-in was only capable of calling methods over DBus (which is enough for most of the above mentioned commands) but the commands Volume Up/Down need to first get the value of volume and then increase/decrease it by some value. Also, we planned to add a feature to the plug-in through which a user can play any song in the playlist just by calling out it’s name (which will require the media player to expose MPRIS Tracklist interface). This was not possible using the plain DBus plugin.

The next steps in my project are:

  • Add MPRIS Tracklist interface to PMC
  • Improve the command plug-in to enable playing a media from the playlist by its name

Stay tuned for further updates (I hope I won’t be late again ;-)